A business and technology enthusiast, David Cummings founded Hannon Hill Corporation in 2001 with the goal to provide powerful XML web content management (WCM) solutions, with an emphasis on personalized customer service.
A WCM subject matter expert, David’s articles have been published on O'Reilly's XML.com and OnJava.com, in addition to popular web development sites such as SitePoint.com. He has presented at the Silicon Valley Web Guild, for Silicon Networks, and the Independent Computer Consultants Association (ICCA).
With more than 10 years of software development experience, David is an experienced programmer and has written code for commercial applications in Java, PHP, ASP, and Visual C++. Prior to founding Hannon Hill Corporation, David worked as an engineer for IBM.
David serves as chairman of the board of the Technology Association of Georgia Content Management Society. A native of Tallahassee, Florida, David holds a bachelor of science degree in economics from Duke University.
My guys and I were excited to get our hands on Firefox 2.0 final once we saw the announcement of the OFFICIAL release come across our screen on Digg. After quickly downloading it to our file server and sending an email link out to the team, I installed the software to begin testing Cascade Server, our content management system. Only then did I notice something was wrong. Very wrong.
The Problem
Upon installing Firefox 2.0, I immediately noticed the slightly updated interface – subtle changes like tabs having 'X's directly on them upon mouse over to close as opposed to on the far right. It was only when I went into Cascade Server that I noticed something was remiss. I browsed around the application on a demo server to try to visit as many screens as possible with my mouse. When I decided to use access keys, like I normally do, things fell apart. Access keys are designed to be keyboard shortcuts for persons with disabilities as well as power users that look for ways to improve their proficiency in an application. Basically, you click Alt (or Ctrl on a Mac) plus a letter or number and it is equivalent to clicking a link, where applicable, on certain websites and web applications.
When the access keys didn't work, I immediately thought something was wrong with the web application. So, naturally, I did a quick "view source" on the page and doubled-checked the code on the page. Sure enough, the "accesskey" attribute was present in the anchor link tag. With the access key not working, I figured there might be a JavaScript error. Nope, nothing there. All the equivalent mouse clicks for links and form fields worked fine. Something was wrong with Firefox 2.0.
Firefox 2.0 doesn't actually break access keys, as was originally thought. Rather, the Firefox developers fixed a different bug that was four years old and decided to change access keys from Alt plus the number/letter to Alt plus Shift plus the number/letter. Big difference. Several issues arise with this:
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Accessibility - Persons with limited motor skills are going to have a harder time clicking three keys at once (e.g. Alt+Shift+S to save) as opposed to two (e.g. Alt+S to save)
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Power users - Power users that are accustomed to using the shortcut keys in a variety of apps like Cascade Server and SugarCRM are going to think the software is broken only to eventually find out Firefox requires and extra "Shift". I predict a good number of trouble tickets will be created for different web application companies and organizations reporting broken access keys.
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Alt+S - The famous Alt+S to submit a form on a forum and other applications will no longer work. The Alt+S controversy was heavily discussed on a MozillaZine thread.
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Platform consistency - Access keys are now even more inconsistent between the Mac and PC. Before you clicked Ctrl on the Mac and Alt on the PC. Now it is still Ctrl on the Mac (they didn't add the Shift requirement for the platform – I know, I checked with Bradley on his Mac Pro) and Alt+Shift on the PC. That's a big difference if you want to casually switch between the two.
The Solution
Thankfully, the MozillaZine thread also provides the solution. According to "stonedyak", you just need to do "about:config" in Firefox and change "ui.key.contentAccess" to "4". That's it. I believe someone will come up with a quick Firefox extension to provide more control over this. It'll be interesting to see how things play out.
Syl Turner is a Software Developer for Hannon Hill. He started working for the Services team in August 2006. He does integration work, project planning, and training clients. He was also the host of the mildly popular "Meet the Team" podcast, which has been cancelled due to low ratings.
Syl graduated from Southern Polytechnic State University with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. He started doing web development over 10 years ago, mostly persuing personal ventures. His professional web development started with freelance and contract work for various companies in the Atlanta area. In the summer of 2006, he started his own web development company, WebYeti Systems, which he still works on when he has free time.
Syl lived in Houston, TX before moving to the Atlanta area in 1995.
Cascade Server is very simple to navigate through already, but some of us power developers need a few more shortcuts. Sure, we have access keys (Alt-E to edit, Alt-S to submit, etc.), but some of us are clickers. That’s why the Cascade Server Firefox Extension was created!
Features
Now, you can easily right-click on an asset and it provides numerous asset options! View, Edit, Copy, Delete and Publish is now only one click away, instead of two!
This works anywhere there’s a link to the asset, too. So if a page is linked within the content, you can right-click on the link to reveal the same options!
That’s not all! If you would like to easily create a new default asset, just right-click anywhere, go to the “New Asset” menu, and select one of the default assets to create a brand new one!
What’s that? There’s more?! Yes! Now, if you know what asset you’d like to go to, just right-click, go to “Go To Asset…” and a new dialog box appears where you can type the absolute path to any asset, or administrative entity, to go directly to it! You can also press F4 to open the dialog box!
I know. I know. You can’t believe it. There are so many useful features, there can’t be anymore, right? Wrong! We have added additional functionality to the Bulk Change tool! On the list of assets screen during a bulk change, right click to reveal the Bulk Change menu! It allows you to select only certain types of assets, even based on regular expressions!
We still have two more features that are helpful! If there are a lot of workflows sitting on the workflow screen, and you’d like to delete them all, just right-click and go to “Delete All Workflows.” If successful, a dialog box will tell you how many workflows have been deleted.
We have one more feature! Similar to deleting all the workflows, you can now delete all the publish jobs in the queue! Go to the publisher status page (Tools -> Publisher -> Active), right-click and go to “Delete All Publish Jobs.” Again, a dialog box will appear if the deletion is successful.
Additional Information
This extension will not allow your users to bypass any security or access rights restrictions. For example, the “Edit” option may still appear on the right-click menu, but if you don’t have access to edit, you won’t be allowed to access the edit screen.
We have found that there are some display issues on Firefox for Mac, where some icons don’t appear. These are only style issues, though. The functionality still works.
This extension works on Firefox 2.0 and higher. We will continue to work on the extension by adding new features and fixing any issues that may appear. However, this is NOT supported by Hannon Hill. Any questions to Hannon Hill about how to use it, any issues that annoy you, etc., will be ignored. This is only a side project and cannot be supported. Feel free to send us feedback or use JIRA to suggest new features, and we may add them on future releases.
We make no guarantees with this extension! Keep that in mind.
Download the Cascade Server Firefox Extension
*Extension Credits: Martin Robinson and Syl Turner, with a very special thanks Andy Gardner, Joel Stevens, Brett Goodwin, Artur Tomusiak, and Steven Pease for all their suggestions and debugging ability.